California Requires New City Buses To Be Electric by 2029 (nytimes.com) 142
California has became the first state to mandate a full shift to electric buses on public transit routes, flexing its muscle as the nation's leading environmental regulator and bringing battery-powered, heavy-duty vehicles a step closer to the mainstream. From a report: Starting in 2029, mass transit agencies in California will only be allowed to buy buses that are fully electric under a rule adopted by the state's powerful clean air agency. The agency, the California Air Resources Board, said it expected that municipal bus fleets would be fully electric by 2040. It estimated that the rule would cut emissions of planet-warming greenhouse gases by 19 million metric tons from 2020 to 2050, the equivalent of taking four million cars off the road. Environmental groups said the new regulation was an important step in cutting tailpipe emissions, which are a major contributor to global warming and California's notorious smog.
good, they can import more energy than (Score:2, Informative)
You do notice that this is from the U.S. goverment. Unbiased enough for you?
n 2016, the California grid region, which covers most of the state and a small portion of Nevada, imported a net daily average of 201 million kilowatthours (kWh) throughout the year from other western regions, or about 26% of its average daily demand. Those imports were supplied by the other two regions that make up the Western Interconnect (WECC). The Northwest region of WECC, which includes mos
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How much energy production is lost? With our power grid, we just can't turn it off if no one is using it, or dial it down to a point where the correct amount of electricity will come in Just in time. For the most part electric vehicles will be charged up over night, during lower energy demand and where these power plants are still turning generators and producing more power then needed.
Sue with Electric Vehicles there will be more demand on the grid, and states may need to purchase more power, but I don't s
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But they are placing more reliance on Electricity which they do not have enough of.
Did you notice that there is a high percentage of power being generated by hydro? Why couldn't California use i
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Could you explain why California should never import electricity ever?
And why this "must never import" position doesn't apply to all the food California exports to every other state?
Yea, but how you going to charge them? (Score:1, Troll)
I recall that just a few months ago California also tossed out all fossil fueled power generation plants in a similar move. I'm just curious how they figure on charging these new buses so they can actually use them?
IF smog is your concern, do CNG powered buses. They run exceptionally clean and CNG generally doesn't require major changes to existing internal combustion engines to work.
IF you are really serious about CO2 emissions, then your problem isn't city buses, but population density. You need to g
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You need to get folks to live where they work
Scattered coworking spaces and work-from-home with virtual offices.
My new venture, Moonset Technologies (primary subsidiary: Secure Democratic Election Services), uses Google services with mandatory 2FA (security keys), Digital Ocean for hosting, and a local incubator coworking space. I'm all-in on video conferencing and do not require the board to all be in one room ever. If I need to hire an engineer in a region, then I can hire one.
E-mail, documents, and other such things hosted by Google have Go
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You need to get folks to live where they work
Scattered coworking spaces and work-from-home with virtual offices.
I can attest that this is fine for some kinds of work, but not for others. Close collaboration and team work suffers when people are not actually face to face, and working from say a "home office" hasn't been shown to be real good for productivity or information security. But it has it's place I suppose.
Good luck with your venture, I wouldn't mind working for a San Francisco company at their wage scale from here in the Midwest and I wouldn't mind staying a few hours later each day to support communicatio
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I haven't paid office rent in 20-odd years for my own businesses, and when not working for myself my clients have been multinationals where you're simply not going to get everyone to commute to one place*, so distance working has to be dealt with anyway.
A fact overlooked by the dev support dept of the NYC HQ of one of my clients which 'saved' money by not buying electronic copies of some critical documentation, and just kept one paper copy in NJ that we could all 'pop over' to read. Not that great for the
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They often have regional pay scales. They'll gladly hire you to work there for less money then someone in an expensive area.
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They often have regional pay scales. They'll gladly hire you to work there for less money then someone in an expensive area.
LOL.. How's that fair?
Actually, it's a seller's market for my kind of labor here right now. My salary is going up more than it did last year. I have a feeling I'm going to be making the same wages as my counter parts in San Francisco pretty soon. We are already seeing the massive real-estate price run up and a massive influx of folks from the better paid areas and wages are following that.
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working from say a "home office" hasn't been shown to be real good for productivity or information security
Virtual infrastructure and the whole Google platform provide for that. If you've connecting via VPN, then I have your home network plugged into my corporate LAN; whereas with e.g. Office365 and SharePoint Online or Gmail and Google Drive, there's no such bridge. Use a U2F Security Key to authenticate and you avoid credential theft. You can do most work from a Chromebook, which inherits the protection of a Chromebook (not being Windows, a strict security model, and containerization as a context partition
Here is how (Score:1)
Glad you asked.
answer [supercaptech.com].
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I recall that just a few months ago California also tossed out all fossil fueled power generation plants in a similar move.
You really need to see someone about this memory issue. 'Cause that didn't happen.
IF smog is your concern, do CNG powered buses.
Still produces some smog-forming chemicals. Also, they're already in place. This is plan is about replacing those buses as they reach EOL.
Also, it's not like this is hard to do. There's no new technology to invent. There's already cities that use 100% EV buses, and these cities are not small. So all that is needed is a reason to switch. And this regulation supplies that reason.
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I recall that just a few months ago California also tossed out all fossil fueled power generation plants in a similar move.
You really need to see someone about this memory issue. 'Cause that didn't happen.
Maybe you missed this: https://www.powermag.com/calif... [powermag.com]
IF smog is your concern, do CNG powered buses.
Still produces some smog-forming chemicals. Also, they're already in place. This is plan is about replacing those buses as they reach EOL.
Also, it's not like this is hard to do. There's no new technology to invent. There's already cities that use 100% EV buses, and these cities are not small. So all that is needed is a reason to switch. And this regulation supplies that reason.
No, Not nearly as many. CNG is much cleaner as a motor fuel, especially diesel. Plus, with current emission standards, MOST newer gasoline powered vehicles are emitting cleaner vapors than they are ingesting when the air quality is bad. We have, at least in the USA, largely dealt with vehicle emissions and the production of smog. In fact, the majority of the problem is no longer vehicle emissions, but all the other things out there like law mower
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Maybe you missed this
Maybe you missed that it's not 2045 yet. So CA hasn't "tossed out all fossil fueled power generation plants" yet.
Also, you'll note the 2045 thing is about formulating a plan to do it, not actually enacting any regulations. Hint: They're not going to hit the 2045 date.
CNG is much cleaner as a motor fuel, especially diesel
Which is why much of the buses in CA already run on it. Moving to EVs is the next step.
Plus, with current emission standards, MOST newer gasoline powered vehicles are emitting cleaner vapors than they are ingesting when the air quality is bad
You're talking about China air quality bad. CA's air quality is already good enough that vehicles are a net reduction in air quality.
You still haven't addressed HOW the state is going to get enough electricity to charge all these batteries
Yeah, it's too bad C
Great with increasing use of wind and solar (Score:5, Insightful)
This will combine really well with increasing reliance on wind and solar power. Also electric buses if they are designed appropriately can when not being used directly as buses can have their batteries used as on-grid storage which can help smooth out fluxuations in the grid. Since buses also mostly have short distances traveled, it is easier for them to do their jobs on an electric system than cars, since the issue of short-range is less of a problem (the buses will always be near their recharge stations).
The only real downsides are twofold: First, that the date is 2029 which is a decade away; I wish the time-range for the mandate was shorter. Second, as California switches to an electric system, other places may actually take the old gasoline buses which isn't necessarily a good thing. The energy involved in making new buses is high, so using a bus for as long as possible seems like a good idea, but there's a point where continuing to use it hits diminishing marginal returns. For example, Bangor, Maine has in the past gotten old buses for essentially free from some cities which were otherwise going to scrap them, but there's some argument that the reliability and efficiency is so poor of these old buses that it may have cost more overall to try to use them.
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2029 is not very ambitious. Shenzhen in China has been 100% electric busses for a few years now, and more than 80% of new busses in China are electric. Maybe they are waiting for US manufacturers to catch up rather than buy Chinese.
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Perhaps look at the cost difficulties Germany is running into with regards to strict adherence to wind, solar and wave power for energy generation?
There are diminishing returns energy-wise and economically speaking. And there still isn't a viable storage option, nor the availability for enough minerals for everyone's electricity usage/storage needs during periods of inclement or non-cooperative weather patterns or night-time use periods.
Maybe it's time to invest in massive pipes made of room-temp supercond
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San Fran was aiming for 2035. https://www.electrive.com/2018... [electrive.com]
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First, that the date is 2029 which is a decade away; I wish the time-range for the mandate was shorter.
I think it's because buying that many new buses is expensive, and cities don't have the money.
2040? (Score:1)
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I think hybrid/natural gas is already in place in many places ... because it's also cheaper.
But I think the first step would be to make public transport more attractive. Cutting the emissions of buses makes sense in Europe, but in the US, you need to first convince people to use them instead of their cars. That would actually have a net benefit on emissions.
Adding constraints to public transportation is only going to make it less attractive, hence less used.
Re: Literally impossible in San Francisco (Score:4, Insightful)
Ãf(TM) show up for every fucking apostrophe when a post is made on iOS?
In your iphone, go to Settings - General - Keyboard and disable "Smart Punctuation". This is what is adding the weird UTF apostrophe when it should just output a normal single quote like God intended.
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Is there a formatting instruction for slashdot somewhere?
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I really don't understand why steep hills are a problem for a BEV bus. Hill starts work really well in car-sized EVs. And obviously, downhill stretches allow for lots of regen.
I'm curious to understand more.
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Found this http://www.sfexaminer.com/muni... [sfexaminer.com] and then this https://www.electrive.com/2018... [electrive.com]
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Thanks -- per drinkypoo's post below, it's clear that the issue is not with BEV buses, but trolleybuses.
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The fact that this informative post is modded "-1" right now is a sign of how certain types of groupthink outside of distro yelling and anti-M$ posts have gotten to Slashdot as well.
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San Francisco, one of the most eco friendly places and Big Brothery cities in the country, canÃ(TM)t do this. They have tried in the past but due to the cityÃ(TM)s extremely steep and tall hills, the only safe way to get busses up and down them is to use diesel busses. [...] Additionally, SF uses overhead cabling to provide power to these electric busses.
When they don't have onboard batteries, we call them trolley[-]buses. The overhead cabling, when used with a wiper contact, is called a pantograph wire. It's not EVs that don't work well on hills, it's pantograph systems, which is why they don't use their electric buses on the steepest hills.
One obvious solution is to stick with the pantograph system, but add battery for those periods when the buses have to be out from under it. This would require relatively little battery, and it could also be used during
Tech-ignorant poster detected. (Score:2)
It's easy enough to specify components which permit electric vehicles to climb steep grades. Because a niche case using buses NOT designed for greater TORQUE OUTPUT didn't work out, you assume it can't.
Need more torque? Spec accordingly.
Need more amps when negotiating very steep inclines? Run catenary power just like trolleys have used for over a century.
Diesel-electric locomotives worked the Saluda Grade (look it up) for decades. There's no inherent electric motor limitation preventing buses from traversin
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It's a conflation of trolley buses and battery electric buses. The former already exist in SF and do indeed have problems with hills. BEVs do not.
4 million cars for how long? (Score:2)
The article says the CO2 reduction over 30 years is the equivalent of taking 4 million cars off the road. But they don't do the math.
The projected total reduction over 30 years is equal to the emissions of 4 million cars in 1 year, based on current emissions. But cars will change over the next 30 years too.
Electric buses might suck less (Score:2)
Buses have to make so many stops that regenerative braking would be a lot more advantageous on buses than on almost any other type of vehicle
But if we want buses to be less detested even in cities that have a popular, comprehensive transit network, having fewer stops would be a big improvement. If you can take a bus, you can walk one block. I know urban dwellers who Uber-commute to a subway station every day because the bus takes two hours to go three miles.
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They have express and local buses for this reason. Also you don't know how many blocks away someone walked to get to the road with all the bus stops.
Greatly improves quality of urban life (Score:3)
A great side benefit of this often not talked about, is now much urban noise pollution this reduces.
Buses travel some roads regularly that are are not often travelled past some time in the evening, so to eliminate bus engine noise will really improve the lives of those that live along bus routes.
The widespread switch to electric vehicles is going to be so much faster than anyone can possible imagine...
Not our dumbest idea (Score:1)
Can we spend money on electric busses instead of a bullet train to nowhere, from nowhere, routed through the middle of nowhere?
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It's not through the middle of nowhere. It's through the densest corridor of population west of Texas. Almost all of the cities in California line up in a neat line connecting north and south through the central valley, and it's not that way by accident. It's because that's *where the railroads put them in the first place*. It makes sense to put HSR there, so you can connect the vast majority of California's population.
I know if you drive down I-5 it looks like the valley is empty -- but that's because I-5
Bus tax? (Score:2)
The existing bus system has energy network that is able to cope with long distances traveled and hours.
The many stops, in traffic all day. Start stop and short distance to the next stop.
The same bus can do both types of city and suburban transport.
The costs of replacing all existing support equipment and upgrading all support services?
Staff having to learn new skills to work supporting each new bus?
Whats the bus tax going to look like so a state c
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As a tax?
In the new ticket price AC?
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What a surprise! My prediction came true.
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38% of California's energy is derived from burning hydrocarbons (mostly natural gas).
Re:Cool. Runs on coal. (Score:5, Insightful)
No wonder you posted as Anonymous. That is a particularly ignorant and asinine thing to say. Completely bogus. EV's do have a higher manufacturing CO2 footprint, but their operating savings even when electricity comes from primarily "dirty" sources breaks even within 3-4 years and it's net savings for every year after that. California's grid is about 35% renewables, the rest natural gas and grid exchange power from the Pacific Northwest (which is over 80% renewables). So it's already much cleaner than much of America.
Face it, fossil fuels will be a thing of the past in a very few years.
Re:Cool. Runs on coal. (Score:5, Interesting)
Does that count replacing the battery pack every few years? Don't forget, those things run on the same battery technology cell phones use, and a cell phone battery only lasts a few years.
Not to mention climate issues - you can't use those batteries in any place where it gets too cold or too hot, which is - well, basically, everywhere.
You do not need to replace the battery pack every few years [drive-green.co.uk]. Also, batteries work just fine in cold temperatures - sure, they lose some range while it's cold, but not permanently. You can also preheat the car to avoid the problem. In Norway, home of reindeer, snow, ice and skiing almost 50% of the car sales in September was pure electric cars [tv2.no]. Granted, the last month of a quarter is higher than usual but on a normal month, like November, it was 41% [gronnkontakt.no]. In addition to this, hybrids are another 25-30%.
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California's a big state, but there are so few city buses in the parts that do freeze regularly during the winter (way away in the Northern end of the state) that the impact will be small. They can heat the batteries in those few locations where it is relevant.
given that they already did conversions to existing buses for the natural gas initiative around 25-30 years ago, it should be no trouble to retrofit existing busses to electric if there is interest and the costs are worth it.
It's a bit more hassle to do an electric conversion, but it's certainly doable. It depends in large part upon the height of the floor how much space is available.
Re:Cool. Runs on coal. (Score:5, Informative)
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
I mean, maybe in general. But this is California we're talking about.
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According to a 2009 article from MIT [technologyreview.com].
The ones in Shanghai right now have been on the road for three years without incident, without failure whatsoever, which in the bus industry is phenomenal,” says Clare, who adds that his company is in talks with New York City, Chicago, and some towns in Florida about trialing the buses. “It will end up being a third generation of the product, which will give 20 miles [of range per charge] or better."
Re:Cool. Runs on coal. (Score:5, Insightful)
Being that natural gas is a cheaper energy source, I would expect most of the power will be from Natural gas. But still having energy production centralized in particular locations, allows for easier regulations and monitoring of the pollution. So if we were to come up with a CO2 Scrubber it would be easier to put it on a smoke stack on a coal power plant, then on the tailpipe of every city bus.
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Well, it actually is cleaner CO2. Because burning natural gas pretty much only produces CO2 and water. While burning coal produces a whole lot of other crap.
More to the point, a power plant is far more efficient than an ICE in a vehicle. So you get more miles traveled by the vehicle from the same CO2 production, even when you account for losses along the way.
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I don't know the specifics of it, but, it's certainly possible for two fuels to have differing amounts of energy produced versus CO2 released.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs... [eia.gov]
So, yes, at least according to EIA.gov, natural gas IS "cleaner" than Coal. Not even getting into side-products released when burning coal.
Re:Cool. Runs on coal. (Score:4, Informative)
It's not "cleaner" CO2. Burning natural gas simply produces /less/ CO2 than burning coal to generate the same amount of electricity.
I'm old enough to remember when environmentalists viewed natural gas as a "bridge" fuel on a path to reducing CO2 emissions. Then of course fracking resulted in an abundance of natural gas supply and it became bad.
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The last coal plant in California is currently being decommissioned.
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https://www.theicct.org/sites/default/files/publications/NGV_ICCT_2005.pdf
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Considering progress BYD and a couple of others are making on electric buses, there's a decent chance that they might make it around 2030s-2040s. Buses need replacement every 15 years or so in a developed country as repair costs begin making them less profitable than investing in new ones and donating the old ones to some less developed country. Note that these are Finnish numbers, may not apply in US, our buses pretty much all go to Estonia etc after ~15 years where work time of repair workers is significa
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Unfortunately EVs have a slew of problems of their own, such as how to generate heating, AC, etc effectively without the warm engine and many of its support systems being possible to tap for it. So while you have less complexity on ICE itself, you have more complexity on many of the supporting systems.
Notably, Musk himself made this point on his appearance on Rogan's podcast, by citing the problems they had making a workable AC system for the Tesla Roadster.
When it comes to bus repair, my understanding is t
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Trolleybuses have a far longer lifespan than diesel buses, this extended lifespan is probably valid for battery buses as well.
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Trolleybuses however have significant routing limitations, and cannot be easily shifted between routes in many cases. They're also very different in terms of how they're built compared to modern battery powered buses, that have challenges of their own. They're nowhere near as peak power limited, nor energy efficiency limited.
Every technology has a very unique set of challenges to be solved. Some experience is certainly shared among them.
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Considering progress BYD and a couple of others are making on electric buses, there's a decent chance that they might make it around 2030s-2040s.
Blue Bird sold the first full-electric bus (a school bus) in the mid-nineties. It had a range of around 100 miles, which is plenty. It survived the pilot project.
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A standard ICE based bus run effectively all the time there's a need for it to be driven (i.e. when first people need to go to work to late evening revellers coming home), minus the necessary maintenance time. This is required for economic operation on city scale. Buses that aren't running should go into maintenance, preferably of preventative kind to ensure reliable running on actual routes. This raises confidence of time critical travellers that the bus will be there on time, and have them actually start
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The real bottom line problem, if you pretend that it isn't gentrification, is that buses suck ass. There are really only a few places that they make sense on any level other than reducing the number of drivers needed to move a given number of people. They perturb traffic badly in cities if you don't give them their own lane, but if you can do that then you have room for rail, and it is much better than a bus at improving the driver to passenger ratio.
The self-driving car is going to murder the bus, though t
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That's what people call "city planning". If your city has problems of the kind and in magnitude you're implying, your city officials have failed at planning in a catastrophic fashion, and you should vote in people who will urgently act to fix these problems as one of the higher priority tasks in terms of budgeting.
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That's what people call "city planning". If your city has problems of the kind and in magnitude you're implying, your city officials have failed at planning in a catastrophic fashion
Sure, when it comes to planned cities, that's valid. Most aren't. They grew. For example, I come from Santa Cruz, which has horrible traffic problems now. You can't practically get across town anywhere near any of the rushes. But it began as a retirement community for Mexican war veterans. It wasn't planned. It became.
Luckily, there is a rail line there, but oh my god what a political clusterfuck is involved. There's been this battle over rail+trail vs. trail only going on for years, which is only now final
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Cities aren't organic life. They don't "grow" without planning. You have everything from city planners to architects to road building companies participating.
Just because you can cite failures in this process, doesn't mean process isn't there. It simply means that process failed for some reason, and there's a need for correction. Which is just as much of a planned action as the city growth itself was.
Re:Progress or Another Regressive Tax? (Score:4, Insightful)
What the fuck are you talking about? Why would you think it matters that a bus is in use for 8 hours? It's range that counts, dummy -- miles travelled. 8 hours in city traffic may well use far fewer miles than two hours of inter-city.
In any event, this is obviously a solved problem given that Shenzen went electric-only with 16000 buses years ago.
A typical Shenzen bus has a range of 200km and doesn't travel that much in a day. It recharges overnight (actually, in two hours) and is ready the next morning.
While you lot are busy making Beavis and Butthead look smart with your idiotic snark, most of the world are just getting on with making the change happen -- including California.
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This analysis doesn't stack up. You have to consider the full energy requirements of a coal-fired EV vs a gas-powered ICE car. For example, you've not accounted for the energy costs of extraction, shipping and -- for gas but not coal -- refining. Studies that do take the time to account for all this properly typically find that the CO2e per km of coal-fired EVs is still ahead of gas-powered ICE cars.
And of course a focus on CO2 exclusively is wrong-headed. Better to have particulates and NOx centralised out